Elements of Digital Literacy
To be literate in digital media you need:
- Technological prowess. This is the ability to get things into and out of the machine. The ability to click a mouse or swipe an iPad is a basic example. The ability to design or program a video game would be an advanced example.
- The ability to evaluate information, entities and environments. This is the skill set that allows one to determine if the content on a website is reliable, if a person or group of people are who they purport to be, and if a given virtual environment is the right place to be.
- The ability to exploit the environment. Such exploitation might take the form of earning money, making friends, developing a business network.
This is my take away from Literacy and Learning in the Digital Age, a new class I developed at Pratt SILS. I taught it this fall and will do it again next fall.
Here are some of the readings:
Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures
Eye Candy
La plante et ses applications ornementales
Eye candy from the NYPL Digital Gallery.
Fashion Now & Then at at LIM College
My colleague Lisa Ryan has organized a symposium exploring fashion and information. Fashion Now & Then will take place on April 9, 2011 at LIM College. We will explore “the past, present, and future uses of fashion information.” I am looking forward to the keynote lecture by Ron Knoth on fashion writer and mannequin designer and Lester Gaba. Two panel discussions will dig into fashion photography and preserving fashion information. I’ll be moderating the second.
Museum Libraries and Archives
What do new professionals working in museum libraries and archives need to learn in graduate school? That is the question that Tula Giannini, Dean and Professor Pratt Institute School of Information & Library Science (SILS), are working on this year. We are interviewing curators, directors, researchers, technologist and other stakeholders. Dean Giannini will publish our findings in whitepaper this spring.
The publication will be one of the culminating pieces of Project M-LEAD, an IMLS funded project at SILS and the Brooklyn Museum, that supports internships for 30 students preparing Information Professionals for careers in Museum Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age.
THULANI DAVIS TO SPEAK AT ICP
In conjunction with For All the World To See, the International Center of Photography and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC are co-hosting this MUST see event.
Blackface Imagery and Its Answers: Stereotyping from the Early Civil Rights Era to the Obama Era
June 28, Monday, 7:00 pm
$5 non-members, free (members & students)
For All the World to See
This Friday, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights opens at the International Center of Photography.
For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights explores the historic role of visual culture in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for racial equality and justice in the United States from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s. This exhibition of 230 photographs, objects and clips from television and film looks at the extent to which the rise of the modern civil rights movement paralleled the birth of television and the popularity of picture magazines and other forms of visual mass media.
T
his is the first major project I have been involved in since opening my own shop last year. I created the educational materials that will accompany the online exhibition.
Maurice Berger, the exhibition’s curator, has published a companion book.
The show opens at International Center of Photography in New York (21 May to 12 September 2010) and will travel to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (tentatively, 15 June to 30 October 2011); and the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, UMBC (September 2012 to January 2013). Other venues will be announced.
